Upload Statements

To load your financial data into CFO Scoreboard, you must export it from your accounting software into an Excel spreadsheet and then upload the Excel spreadsheet into CFO Scoreboard.

The first time you create a new company, you will want to upload the past few years of your company’s financial statements, and going forward, you will want to upload your monthly financial statements each month when you close the books.

Most accounting software, including Quickbooks, can be exported into the format CFO Scoreboard requires, but in some cases, you may need to make some manual adjustments to your spreadsheets before uploading them. CFO Scoreboard needs your financial statements to be organized a specific way, so let’s take a look at the spreadsheet format that CFO Scoreboard requires. CFO Scoreboard needs two spreadsheets: one for your income statement and one for your balance sheet, but the formats of the spreadsheets are the same.

Your financial statements must be in Excel format with the account names down the left and months across the top. Some accounts will have sub-accounts, and the hierarchy of your accounts is shown by having the name of a sub-account in a cell below and to the right of the parent account. Your sub-accounts can have their own sub-accounts. CFO Scoreboard will ignore any totals, so if your accounting system includes them, that’s fine. The height of the row, font size, and other formatting is also ignored, so don’t worry about trying to make your accounting system’s spreadsheet match our examples – we only care about the data.

Across the top of the spreadsheet are columns for each month’s data you are importing. You can import multiple months at a time, and if your accounting system adds yearly totals, CFO Scoreboard will ignore them, so don’t worry about removing them.

If your find a mistake in your financials, just reimport them with the corrected data – the most recent data that is imported will overwrite any existing data for the same time period.

To start the upload, click the Upload Statements button. The first step is to select your income statement spreadsheet and your balance sheet spreadsheet. Click “Upload and Continue” to move on to the next step.

If this is the first time you have uploaded your financial statements, CFO Scoreboard will ask you to classify your chart of accounts. The following instructions about classifying your expenses is typically a one-time set-up and will not need to be repeated.

When you classify your accounts, you are telling CFO Scoreboard key information about your chart of accounts that we need in order to analyze your financial statements.

On your income statement, we need to know three things about each account:

First we need to know the type of account – is it a revenue account, a cost of goods sold account, or an expense account. If it’s an expense account, we need to know the type of expense. CFO Scoreboard will attempt to determine the type of account based on its name and location in the account hierarchy, but you will need to review this to make sure that each account is classified correctly. Pay special attention to any accounts that are Marketing and Sales related expenses but that may have been incorrectly categorized as General & Administrative.

The second thing we need to know is if the account is a payroll account. If the account contains payroll expenses or expenses related to payroll, such as benefits or payroll taxes, click the checkbox next to the account.

The third thing we need to know is if any account is related to the Owner’s personal (non-business) expenses. Owner's personal expenses are expenses paid for by the business (usually to help reduce income taxes) but don’t really have anything to do with running the actual business. This includes the owner's salary and any "Ya-Ya" expenses: company cars, personal travel, the yard service for your personal residence, kids on the payroll and the like. CFO Scoreboard can give you much better optics on how your business is truly performing if we can understand which expenses are directly related to the business and which are related to the personal lifestyle of the owner of the business.

If an account contains only owner’s expenses, meaning that every expense that gets logged into this account is an owner’s expense, then click the check the box next to the account.

You may have some accounts that contain a mix of expenses, some of which are owner’s expenses and some which are directly related to the business. If this is the case, I recommend that you sit with your accountant to create separate accounts for your owner’s expenses going forward. Once you have separate accounts for your owner’s expenses in your accounting system, you can classify those accounts in CFO Scoreboard as Containing Owner’s Expense and get the benefit of the increased optics we provide..

Once you have completed classifying the accounts on your income statement, continue on to classify the accounts on your balance sheet. On your balance sheet, we only need to know the type of account. Again, CFO Scoreboard will try to determine the type of account, but you will need to check to make sure everything is classified correctly. If you have questions about how to classify your accounts, ask your accountant or bookkeeper.

When you have finished classifying your balance sheet accounts, click Continue to complete the upload process.

Classifying your accounts was a one-time exercise, and you should not have to perform this step again in the future unless you reorganize your accounts or add new accounts. If you later determine you have misclassified your accounts, you can correct your error in the Company Settings section of the application.

At this point, your data has been successfully uploaded, and you can click the View Reports button to see how CFO Scoreboard has analyzed the data you just imported.

However, I recommend that you take a moment to provide some information about your company that is not contained in your accounting software. This information will allow CFO Scoreboard to give you even better optics on the performance of your company. To do this, click Edit Employees and Units Sold.

The Edit Employees and Units Sold page asks you to provide some additional information about your company that is not normally found in your financial statements. This information is incredibly helpful in providing an advanced understanding of your business.

First, we need to know how many employees the company had in each month. The most recent few months are always shown – if you want to see more, click the “Show More Months” link to expand the list.

If you are entering historical data for the first time that goes back a few years, you can estimate the number of employees. Going forward, keep up with the number of employees every month so that CFO Scoreboard can provide you with optics around this metric.

Next, we need to know the number of units you sold each month. Again, if you are setting CFO Scoreboard up for the first time, you might not have all the historical data on “units”. No problem. You can make an estimate, but for sure start keeping track of this and entering it every month going forward. We use this for per-unit analysis in the Trends section of CFO Scoreboard, and it gives you incredible optics on your business.

The idea is this: Let’s say you’re in the restaurant business.  If your “per unit” measure is number of customers, dividing every line item or account on the income statement (for all revenue and all expense categories) by the number of customers served in the time period gives you a completely different set of optics than thinking in terms of only gross “dollars” or percentages.  You could find out the amount of alcohol or dessert consumed per customer or the amount of food cost or labor per customer.

If you can see what your revenue and expenses are on a per unit basis, your brain can now go to work on tweaks and strategies that will knock pennies per unit off your labor costs, for example.  Or add pennies per unit to your sales.  A few cents per unit one way or the other can be a significant number to your bottom line!  Knowing you’re spending $31.37 in labor on a per unit basis is exponentially more powerful than simply seeing a lump number of $213,900 in wages and salaries on an income statement.

Many businesses, like lawyers or consultants, are selling time and not a physical product, so in these instances, you might choose to use “billable hours” as the per unit metric.

Here is the bottom line: Measuring revenue and expenses per unit over an extended period of time is a game changing idea that will spark your thinking and put profits in your jeans.

Once you have entered the number of Employees and Units Sold, click the “Save” button to return to the reports..